Beta-Alanine Lowers 800-Meter Times

More evidence that the supplement boosts middle-distance performance.

Despite what the Internet may tell you, there's a very short list of legal performance-enhancing supplements with reasonable evidence behind them. There's caffeine and creatine. Lately beet juice has been making a good bid to join the list. And another emerging candidate is beta-alanine, which is thought to be most useful in middle-distance events lasting ~2-6 minutes. I've blogged about beta-alanine a few times before; for a more detailed explanation of how it's thought to buffer muscle pH, see this post. (That post also discusses the idea that even for much longer events, beta-alanine may help boost your finishing kick.)

Anyway, there's a new study out in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, from a group in Australia, that looks at beta-alanine for 800-meter running performance. The design was pretty straightforward: take 21 club-level track runners, have them run two 800-meter time trials a week part; then give half of them 80 mg/kg of beta-alanine per day, divided into four daily doses, for 28 days, while the other half take a placebo; then have them all run two more 800-meter time trials a week apart.

Here's what the 800-meter splits for the beta-alanine group looked like:

As you can see, they end up going considerably faster. The average time dropped from 2:25.7 to 2:22.1. Here's the control group:

As you'd expect, not much change: the average time went from 2:36.8 to 2:36.2.

So the immediate and obvious question is why the control group was so much slower than the intervention group before the study even started – that seems like a failure of randomization. As it turns out, three of the original 21 runners dropped out during the study "for personal reasons" – and two of those drop-outs happened to be the two fastest runners in the placebo group. That's unfortunate, but it's what happens sometimes. It seems unlikely to have affected the results either way, but it does make the results look a little less pretty on the surface.

That little hiccup aside, the results were pretty much exactly what they expected, which is a good sign for beta-alanine's bid to be considered a fully validated sports supplement. Its function is very similar to how baking soda loading is thought to act, with the key advantage that it doesn't give you explosive diarrhea. Which is nice.